What is Social Media Marketing?
Based on the Webster dictionary’s definitions of social, media and marketing it would be safe to define social media marketing as: Creating relationships using online resources for the purpose of selling or purchasing products.
Social media marketing is the process of marketing through social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. By utilizing the social aspect of the web, social media marketing is able to connect and interact on a much more personalized and dynamic level than through traditional marketing. It’s the technique that targets social networks and applications to spread brand awareness or promote particular products.
Why Social Media Marketing?
As a business owner, you need to be where your customers are, and the modern customer is active on social media all the time.
Here are few of the statistics that prove why social media marketing is more preferred mode of marketing among the marketers. Social media marketing has a 100% higher lead-to-close rate than outbound marketing. Also, 84% of B2B marketers use social media in some form. No matter what you sell and who you sell it to, using social media as a marketing tool can help you grow your brand and get better ROI. Social networks are now a substantial part of every marketing strategy. The benefits of using social media are so great that anyone not implementing this cost-effective resource is missing out on a phenomenal marketing opportunity.
If you still not convinced by above statistics and still wondering how social media can benefit your business, look no further. I’ve outlined the key reasons below.
Brand Loyalty
One of the main goals of almost all businesses is developing a loyal customer base. With so many alternatives to choose from, Customers are often overwhelmed and want an easy way to authenticate a business that they are dealing with for the first time. Seeing that you are active on social media helps to fill potential customers with trust, it signals that you care about your customers. And if anything go wrong, that it will be easy to contact you. This direct method rarely gave customers an idea of the people behind their favorite brands.
Delivering real-time responses to customer questions and concerns establishes your company as helpful and reinforces the reliability of your brand. Eventually this constant engagement with your audience helps you to build a loyal base of customers. A study by The Social Habit shows that 53 percent of Americans who follow brands on social are more loyal to those brands.
Higher Conversion Rates
Social media marketing can help you bring up your conversion rates in many ways. The most important one is its humanization element. People pay attention to the brands who are active on social media accounts with relevant content. Social Media accounts with engaging content provide human touch to the otherwise distant faceless company. Brands become more humanized by such interactions. By simply building and interacting with your audience in social media you can improve your conversion rates on your existing traffic.
With increased visibility, your business gains more opportunities for conversion. This is one of the significant reason for higher conversion rates. In the State of Social Selling in 2015, nearly 75 percent of companies that engaged in selling on social media reported an increase in sales in 12 months.
Cost Effective
One of the important feature that raise businesses to higher level in using social media marketing is the complete budget for preservation. Joining social media sites and maintaining profiles involves little monetary investment on your part. You don’t have to pay per link clicked or bid on keywords. All you have to do is sign up and start posting. The biggest investment is time. If you are able to put together a dedicated social marketing team, even this shouldn’t be a problem. Marketing operations of social media networks may also be more cost-effective compared to other technique you may be dealing with today.
Lead Generation
If your business hasn’t gotten into social media marketing yet, the Internet holds a vast source of potential leads. Hundreds of thousands of people use Facebook, Twitter, Google + and other social networks every day, and their opinions often influence the purchase decisions of their peers. Over 75% of B2C companies generate leads through Facebook.. Creating an engaging ad campaign on any network has the potential to introduce your brand to an immense amount of new markets.
If you put your brand into an atmosphere where the conversations are already happening, chances are someone online will mention your brand to a family member or friend. This is where the cycle begins and it provides you an opportunity to close them.
Improves SEO
Being active on social media will help you increase the amount of traffic that your website receives. Successful social media activities will always improve the amount of traffic referrals your website receives, playing an essential initial role in your sales funnel. Consistent involvement in social media is key to getting likes, retweets and recommendations. Even the social networks themselves are becoming search engines – if you type keywords into Twitter, real-time results are brought up from users and outlets from around the world.
Search engines see this attention as a positive vote from users and will begin to regard your content as being of high quality. Quality is an important part of the SEO equation, so the more “votes” customers give to your content, the better your business should rank in search results.
Social media Marketing has a treasure trove of benefits to help you grow your business. By using it to learn more about your customers, engage with your audience, and extend your brand reach, you’ll be converted before you know it. The longer you wait to put your company on any social media platform, the longer you are hindering your success. When social media marketing is done right, you have the potential create brand loyalty, respond and respect customers’ comments, stay relevant, get higher conversion rates, gain leads and have the potential to appear higher in search engine rankings.
PhotoCredits: Socialknowhow.com, pardot, bigbuisnessweb, cosmeticbusiness, yottaa, insync.
